really great work qhumm....but ehm...your renders could be a bit better
make sure you have a grey/white background and that the "floor" plane is also a nutral colour. try using omni's instead of a spotlight. or, if you dont mind waiting about 10 minutes for a render, put a skylight above the model, and turn cast shadows on (it might take longer than 10 mins, depends how busy the scene is and your graphics card etc..)
Heh, I have limited materials to work with seeing as I can't modify the model materials without actually redoing them (I use multitexturing in my ASE exporter). The exception is Odin and Ifrit 1, where I completely replace the materials.
The background is black since I wanted to highlight the central object of attention, i.e. the model. Also it has the nice feature of hiding where the floor pane ends. The floor itself is lambertian white, with the models being illuminated by three omni lights set up around them, with fine-tuned attenuation distances to provide a good spectrum of colors in the model and in the shadows. The lights, floor and model are then rendered using mental ray with global illumination.
The simpler renders take 2-3 minutes on my computer, while the more advanced (glass Odin) took 15-20 minutes. Also, graphics cards don't affect offline renderers.
in 3dsmax change the filtering to Catmull-rom. The defaul area filter is cheap and it showld be burned in a butcket or somethin. Catmul rom will make the rendering way sharper thant what is it now.
I was not aware of this filtering technique... though could you define "sharper"?
EDIT: Ah, explains why I never saw it. Mental ray does not have any implementation of Catmull-rom, possibly due to different methods used in rendering. Catmull-rom produces sharper imagery by edge enhancement, apparently. Could be argued that it's a destructive filter then, since it shows things that aren't really there.
Still, the images do look like they've been through an improved version of Photoshop's "Sharpen"...